Discriminating Tastes

Reverse racism and the “beer summit”

The Reverend Jeremiah Wright, President Obama’s former pastor, has often described his preaching style as prophetic, and, sure enough, his brief but spectacular turn in the campaign limelight last year has proved a harbinger of things to come. After months of criticism, Obama renounced Wright, whose fiery sermons had been widely excoriated as “racist”—that is, anti-white. Around the same time, Obama explained that when he described his grandmother as a “typical white person,” he hadn’t meant to insult white people. Then, following the Inauguration, some protested that the Reverend Joseph Lowery’s benediction, derived from an old blues song, was anti-white. And Newt Gingrich used his Twitter account to call Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, Judge Sonia Sotomayor—and her “wise Latina” remark—“racist.” (A few days later, he took it back.)

One imagines that Sergeant James Crowley, of the Cambridge Police Department, had not meant to contribute to this ongoing argument when, on July 16th, he responded to a 911 call from a woman who said that there had been “two gentlemen trying to get in a house,” and, after a dispute, ended up arresting Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the Harvard professor who lives there. One imagines the same of President Obama, who, when asked about the incident during a press conference the next week, said that racial profiling was a nationwide problem, and that, in this case, the police had “acted stupidly.” Critics claimed that Obama’s comments reflected his own biases. Thaddeus McCotter, a Republican congressman from Michigan, drafted a resolution calling on him to apologize to Crowley. National Review Online accused him of “racial self-aggrandizement.” And the radio and television host Glenn Beck said that the President had revealed his “deep-seated hatred for white people,” adding, “This guy is, I believe, a racist.”

Half a century ago, when people talked about anti-white racism, it was often depicted as a symptom of a broader derangement. In “The Hate That Hate Produced,” an influential television documentary about Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam, from 1959, Mike Wallace warned viewers about “the rise of black racism” and “black supremacy.” (Four years later, a cover story in Jet reported that Eartha Kitt considered herself a victim of “reverse racism”; the magazine said that “black supremacists” resented her marriage to a white man.) But, in the late nineteen-sixties and early seventies, in the aftermath of the Civil Rights Act and the executive orders that followed, accusations of reverse racism grew less personal and more commonplace. Newspapers printed articles and letters about anti-white discrimination in the workplace. Later, protracted legal battles over affirmative action helped popularize a once novel character: the white civil-rights plaintiff.

Affirmative action, it now seems clear, helped change white America’s attitude about race, although not entirely in the way that its creators intended. In 1982, scarcely a decade after President Nixon mandated affirmative action for companies with government contracts, a study published in the American Sociological Review found that only twenty-seven per cent of whites thought that blacks had a worse than average chance of succeeding in America, while slightly more, about twenty-nine per cent, thought that blacks’ opportunities were better than average. Sixty-three per cent thought that racial minorities enjoyed at least a little bit of “unfair” reverse discrimination.

There are plenty of people in America, especially in black America, who believe that reverse racism is a contradiction in terms. Racism, the argument goes, should not be thought of as a personal failing; it’s a social system, with a specific history. Discrimination against whites, however unfair, isn’t part of that system, and therefore is not analogous to discrimination against blacks. This history adds symbolic weight to stories that might otherwise inspire only passing curiosity—like, say, the one about the black Harvard professor who was suspected of breaking into his own house. Systemic racism doesn’t require malice, or a specific perpetrator; everyone who benefits is guilty, even people who don’t think that they benefit.

In the past few decades, though, reverse racism has undergone a similar redefinition, from symptom to system. Some who are skeptical of affirmative action, and of other programs designed to advance non-whites, consider reverse racism to be so pervasive, and so well entrenched, that it can only be described as systemic. (Think of Frank Ricci, the white firefighter who argued, successfully, that the city of New Haven had violated his civil rights.) And, despite Beck’s diagnosis of Obama’s “hatred,” many of the people who worry about Obama’s view of race see him not as personally bigoted but as complicit with anti-white interests and policies.

In fact, the “reverse” has largely been dropped from “reverse racism”; in today’s mainstream political discourse, “racism” regularly refers to anti-white racism. Meanwhile, many politicians and commentators concerned with the brutal legacy of old-fashioned racism have learned to speak about it in less abstract, less inflammatory terms: they talk about too-high incarceration rates, or the need for better communication between police officers and the communities they serve. Certainly, Obama is at his most effective when he sticks to concrete prescriptions (the means) and airy evocations of progress (the end). This, by and large, has been his strategy and his script, and even he may not know exactly why, on being asked about Gates, he strayed from it.

The Cambridge morality play culminated in a much bruited meeting at the White House between Obama, Gates, Crowley, and—a surprise addition—Vice-President Joe Biden. Because the press was kept at a distance, many stations ran surreal, near-silent footage of four men sipping beer, accompanied only by the soothing percussion of clicking cameras. Afterward, there were cheerful but vague reviews from the participants (Crowley, “A cordial and productive discussion”; Gates, “We hit it off”), and promises to keep the conversation going. Obama, for his part, seemed ready, maybe even eager, to change the subject. He had discovered, surely, that a black President can pay a price for talking about racism. And he was no doubt reminded that to some Americans “racism” doesn’t mean what it used to. ♦